A League of Their Own

Commie Ball: A Journey to the End of a Revolution

A boy steps up to bat in a pickup game in Havana. By Claudia Daut/Reuters/Corbis.

Some of the greatest baseball players the world has never seen are in Cuba, where their talent is government property, and their only chance of turning pro is the risky boat ride to Florida. Gus Dominguez, an L.A. sports agent, has done more than anyone to help escaped players join major-league U.S. teams, but now he sits in a California jail, convicted of smuggling athletes. The author flies to Havana for an unprecedented scouting of the island’s stars as he reports on the twisted dynamics behind the Dominguez case.

Before he became a casualty in the immigration wars, Gus Dominguez was just another agent in Los Angeles. Then, on October 20, 2006, the United States government issued its first-ever indictment for smuggling athletes into the country, with Dominguez cast as the mastermind. The alleged contraband: five Cuban baseball players. Specifically, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida claimed that Dominguez had identified four pitchers and a shortstop in Havana and then paid $225,000 to smugglers to sneak them by boat to Florida and drive them to California, where he auctioned them off to Major League Baseball teams.

Intriguing as it sounded, the case didn’t receive much attention, at least not at first. Outside of professional-baseball circles no one had heard of Gus Dominguez. But inside baseball Dominguez had made his mark as the agent who, back in the early 1990s, invented the market for Cuban baseball players, and still sat somewhere near the middle of it. When the sports media finally picked up on the indictment, the Bush-appointed assistant secretary of homeland security for U.S. immigration and customs enforcement, Julie Myers, issued this statement: “Though this case involves a Beverly Hills sports agent and talented baseball players, it is remarkably similar to the human smuggling operations that ICE encounters every day. The ringleaders put the lives of illegal immigrants at risk and sought to profit from their labor.”

But there were several aspects of the case remarkably dissimilar to anything that had ever happened before. Up to the moment he turned himself in to the law, Dominguez had been a model citizen. He was 48 years old, with nothing worse than a parking ticket against his name. He’d come to the United States from Cuba in 1967, at the age of eight. His parents had abandoned their property in the Cuban province of Camagüey to become janitors in Los Angeles, to give their three children a new country. The eldest, Fernando, became an editor with the Los Angeles Times. Gus graduated from Cal State–Northridge, married his high-school sweetheart, Delia, and then opened his own graphic-design firm. He’d become a sports agent practically by accident, and baseball writers who covered the Cuban beat considered him the honest end of a squirrelly trade. The players who’d hired him thought of him as a friend and family man first, a businessman second. “I signed with Gus,” says Henry Blanco, the Chicago Cubs catcher, “because of what other players told me. One said, ‘He might not be the best businessman, but he’s the best guy. You can trust him with your money and your wife.’ And you can.”

Then there was the potential value of the cargo. There may be no entrapped pool of human talent left on earth with the dollar value of Cuban baseball players. “I compare Cuba to the Dominican Republic,” says Phil Dale, an Australian who played in the Cincinnati Reds’ organization and now scouts players in the Far East for the Atlanta Braves. “But the Cubans are better. Their island has bigger and stronger athletes.” Their island also has more people—11 million to the Dominican Republic’s 9 million. There are now more than 1,700 Dominican players under contract to U.S. professional baseball teams—compared with just 40 Cubans—and close to 100 are playing in the big leagues. Back in the old days, before Cuba was closed for business, it supplied more players to the major leagues than all the other Latin-American countries combined. In 1961, Cuba entered its first post-revolutionary baseball teams in international competitions and proceeded to beat the hell out of everyone, including the Dominicans. For a 10-year stretch, starting in 1987, the Cubans were 129–0 in major international competitions. “There are plenty of Cubans who are big-league [caliber] players,” says Chuck McMichael, who scouts the Latin professional leagues for the Atlanta Braves and helped hire Cubans to play shortstop and catcher for his team. “We just don’t know who they are. But I can’t recall a guy on the Cuban national team [which competes in the World Cup and the Olympics] that you wouldn’t at least sign. You’d sign every guy off that team.”

For the 30 players who traveled with the Cuban national team, quitting Communism for the big leagues has been as simple as missing the bus or hopping the wall in left field. But relatively few Cuban players have left their island and almost none of the best. What has come to the U.S., instead, is a rattlebag of players past their prime, players in political trouble, players injured, and players who were never very successful in Cuba. Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez escaped by boat in 1997, when he was in his early 30s, and became a star with the Yankees—but he had spent most of his prime in Cuba, and insisted that he never would have left had he not been banned from baseball by the Cuban government because his half-brother, Livan, had fled Cuba two years earlier. Gus Dominguez’s former client Rey Ordoñez, who spent seven years as the starting shortstop for the New York Mets, left Cuba in 1993 only after it became clear that he was blocked by better players from starting for his Cuban team, the Havana Industriales.

The haul that landed Gus Dominguez in a U.S. federal court were cases in point. All five were in their mid- to late 20s and yet none had ever been selected for Cuba’s national team. Three—Allen Guevara, Osmany Masso, and Yoankis Turino—failed to elicit even faint interest from professional scouts. The other two signed professional contracts, but in the minor leagues. Last season Osbek Castillo pitched for the Mobile Baybears, the double-A affiliate of the Arizona Diamondbacks, and Francisley Bueno for the Atlanta Braves’ double-A affiliate, the Mississippi Braves. “There’s at least half a billion dollars of baseball players in Cuba right now and probably a lot more,” says Joe Kehoskie, an agent who has represented a number of Cuban big-league players. “Of all the people to bring over, it sure as hell wouldn’t have been those guys.”

That was another strange aspect of the U.S. government’s case: it accused Dominguez of ruthless profit seeking, but he’d lost a small fortune. It shouldn’t have been that hard to make a killing in Cuban ballplayers, especially for the one man outside Cuba with perhaps the most information about them. But that just begged the question: What did Gus Dominguez think he was paying for? He admitted that he’d wired $225,000 into the account of a smuggler turned U.S.-government witness named Ysbel Medina-Santos. He admitted, more damningly, that the money wasn’t his: he didn’t have that kind of cash. He’d borrowed it from the account of a client, Henry Blanco, the Chicago Cubs catcher. Blanco said he didn’t mind. “Gus is like my brother,” he told me. And in any case, Dominguez had refinanced his house and replaced the money before Blanco even knew it was gone.

But why had he done it? The more you looked at the numbers, the less sense they made. At the time, Dominguez kept no more than 5 percent of a player’s signing bonus and 4 percent of his contract as long as it was above the league minimum. Simply to recoup his investment Dominguez would have needed the players to be worth something more than $5 million to big-league teams. There was never much hope that these players would ever make that kind of money. The U.S. government needed the jury to believe that the American best informed about Cuban ballplayers didn’t know which ones were worth stealing; that he’d refinance his house to smuggle the wrong guys; that Cuba was a mysterious black hole, about which this sort of ignorance was plausible. And it did! After listening for seven days the jury quickly reached its verdict: guilty.

Fidel Castro with Leslie Anderson and Cuba’s national team in 2006. Photograph by Sven Creutzmann/reportage by Getty Images.

Soon after he seized power, in January 1959, Fidel Castro banned professional sports from his island. The next year he tossed out the first pitch to open the Cuban amateur league and even took a few cuts with a bat. The ramrod-straight stance, plus the whiff of fourth-grade girl in the cock of his bat, should have dispelled the rumor that the Maximum Leader had once been a pro prospect, but the myth survived this brush with reality. (“Total bullshit,” says Ralph Avila, who is in charge of scouting in the Dominican Republic for the Los Angeles Dodgers and played ball in Havana during what was meant to have been Fidel’s prime. “Fidel never played any sport at university. He didn’t have time. In Havana there was a pitcher named Felix Castro. Fidel used his name to say that he played baseball.”)

For the next 30 years no Cuban ballplayer left. Then, on July 10, 1991, the Cuban national team, returning from a tournament, spent the night in the Miami airport hotel. A pitcher named René Arocha walked out of his room, found his way to his aunt’s Miami apartment, and never returned. From that moment, until the end of the 1990s, the most common route out of Cuba for a baseball player was to make the national team and then, when the team was abroad, walk away. Sneak out of the hotel late at night and run to the nearest blood relative you had in Miami.

The funny thing was, at least in the beginning, they had no idea of their market value. René Arocha, for one, never imagined he could play in the big leagues. “I didn’t leave Cuba because I wanted a baseball career,” Arocha says. “I didn’t think I was at the same level as the big-leaguers. I thought the quality of the major leagues was light-years ahead of me.” But then he got a call from a Cuban-American named Gus Dominguez, who explained how thrilled he was “that someone finally told Fidel to go and shove it,” and that “you are better than you know.” At the time, Dominguez still worked at his graphic-design firm, in Los Angeles, but happened to be in Miami on business. They arranged to meet. “If Gus hadn’t called, I don’t think I’d even have tried to play baseball,” recalls Arocha. “He took me to a big-league game. That’s when it dawned on me, Jesus, I think I can play with these guys.”

Arocha flew with Dominguez to California, where Dominguez planned to introduce him to Jose Canseco’s agent, whom Dominguez knew slightly. (Canseco, the famed Oakland Athletics slugger, came to this country from Cuba as an infant with his family.) The morning of the meeting, Canseco’s agent called and canceled. Dominguez had taken the call and tried to put a happy face on things, but Arocha demanded to know exactly what this big-time American agent had said: “We have someone more important to meet with.”

“O.K.,” Arocha recalls saying. “I’m not important to them. They’re not important to me. You be my agent.”

“I have no idea how to do it,” said Dominguez.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Arocha. “We’ll figure it out together. You’re the only one who has helped me so far.”

A year later René Arocha went 11–8 for the St. Louis Cardinals and found himself in the running for Rookie of the Year. “After a while,” says Arocha, “I’d look at all the players on the field and think, I have a friend back in Cuba who is as good or better than everyone who is here.”

That’s how Gus Dominguez had become a sports agent. He took an interest in these Cubans when no one else did, and so he became, by default, their guy. The players in Cuba learned of Arocha’s success—and saw the Cuban government’s decision not to punish his family—and thought, If he can do it, I can, too. In 1993, two years after Arocha defected, the Cuban national “B” team flew to Buffalo, New York, for the World University Games. Eddie Oropesa, a 21-year-old pitcher on his first trip abroad, sneaked out of the college dorm in which he was housed, but couldn’t find the cousin who was supposed to be waiting. Terrified, he wound up wandering around some graveyard in the dark. He ran back to his room and stared at the ceiling. The next morning, as the team warmed up, Oropesa handed his spikes to his good friend shortstop Rey Ordoñez, then dashed for the fence behind home plate. It was at least 12 feet high, but he went up and over in his stocking feet. “I didn’t know where my cousin was,” Oropesa recalls. “I just started climbing the fence. I heard Rey shouting, ‘Oropesa! Oropesa! Oropesa’s gone crazy!’ But I didn’t look back. When I hit the ground I just started running.” Newly liberated, he heard Gus Dominguez was the man to see. “I wanted to leave not because I thought I could play baseball,” says Oropesa, “but because I didn’t want my son to go through the experience that I had. And the only way for him to get out was for me to get out first.” (Dominguez helped Oropesa extract his wife and son from Cuba three years later.)

Two days after, Ordoñez fled, too. He followed Eddie Oropesa’s tracks to Gus Dominguez and became the shortstop for the New York Mets.

A few made it to the big leagues, most did not, but they all needed a great deal of help. From the outside it all looked so easy for the likes of Arocha and Oropesa and Ordoñez. None of it was. Nothing in their experience had prepared them for American life. One of Gus Dominguez’s new Cuban clients, Ariel Prieto, took his $1.2 million signing-bonus check from the Oakland A’s, stuck it in his jeans, and ran them through the washing machine. Eddie Oropesa, awed by the size of American refrigerators, bet a fellow player he could stay inside one for 15 minutes—and might have suffocated if Dominguez hadn’t opened the door and found him shivering. Latin players were just then flooding into American professional baseball, but these Cubans weren’t like the others: they’d been governed by fear, and when you took the fear away they were rudderless. They ate too much and listened too little, all the while longing for their loved ones back in Cuba. Dominguez took them in, even the ones who didn’t stand much of a chance of making it big. He housed them with his family, sometimes for months, and helped them to cope with the shock of freedom. And they were grateful. Sprung from the fridge, Oropesa debuted for the Philadelphia Phillies on opening day 2001, against the Florida Marlins. In a tight game, with men on base, and his agent in the stands, Oropesa came in to face Marlins slugger Cliff Floyd. Floyd popped out. “And when I went to the dugout,” says Oropesa, “I was crying. It was my most beautiful day playing baseball. And if Gus hadn’t been here, I don’t know if I would have played.”

In the late 1990s and early 2000s the free market became even more elusive for the Cuban players. To flee the Cuban national team you needed to be selected for it, and after several small waves of defections, the Cuban government became shrewder in its selections. Any player deemed a flight risk was kept on the island. Families became hostages: older players with wives they loved and lots of children were preferred to younger ones without emotional attachments. A player caught talking to an American, or on the phone with a defector, might find himself suspended from baseball. The paranoia became self-fulfilling. After Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez left, the sports ministry dropped from the national team a pitcher named Adrian Hernandez, who shared not only a last name (he was no relation) but also the same quixotic high-leg-kicking windup, which they took as a sign that he admired the defector. His blackballing compelled Adrian Hernandez to flee Cuba in 2000 and sign a $4 million contract with the Yankees.

The road from Miami to Key West is narrow and slow and ill-designed for a Cuban baseball player in a hurry to get to the big leagues. Osbek Castillo has driven it twice before. The first time was in the dawn of August 22, 2004, when he crawled out of the ocean and headed off to find a market for his services. The second was almost three years later, in April 2007, when he drove to Key West to be a witness in the trial of Gus Dominguez. His third trip was with me late this past winter, a few days before he was scheduled to report to spring training in Tucson with the Arizona Diamondbacks. Not much has changed since he first laid eyes on the place. “You never saw a single American flag in Cuba,” he says, pointing out the car window. “Here they are everywhere.” And they are: American flags and the signs in English that he cannot understand.

It’s a gorgeous sunny day, and Osbek’s clearly enjoying the trip. A small plane flies overhead. “That plane reminds me of the Coast Guard,” he says, with a big yawn. “That’s how they caught us the first time. They spotted us from a plane like that.”

That first trip had been in July 2004. He’d let a Cuban with contacts in Miami know of his displeasure. “I had absolutely no plans to leave,” he says. “But I wasn’t even pre-selected for the national team. Then I realized they had no plans for me.” A few days later he received a call from a man in the States, who said his name was “Javier.” Javier told him to be ready to leave at a moment’s notice. A few weeks later Javier called back and said, “Today’s the day.” Osbek filled a small bag with family photos and drinking water. Everything else he left behind. He told no one of his plans, not even his parents, for fear that they might tell someone else and he’d be tossed in prison.

That night a stuffy, windowless van drove him from his apartment outside Havana to a beach in Matanzas, a few hours away, picking up along the way 21 other people who would ride out on the same boat. Among these were the four other baseball players: Francisley Bueno, Allen Guevara, Yoankis Turino, and Osmany Masso. The motorboat was just big enough to hold them, but the ballplayers were still treated as the first-class passengers. Racing from the shore in the dark, they nearly collided with what they feared was a Cuban police boat. “The driver said some people would have to jump out into the water, to slow the police boat down,” says Osbek. “They would have to stop and pick up the people. They were trying to decide who would jump out, and the driver said the baseball players had to stay in the boat, because we were the most valuable. Then everyone on the boat started swearing they were baseball players, so they wouldn’t have to jump out.”

The police boat turned out to be a fishing boat, and so no one was forced to jump into the ocean. But four hours later, as they approached the Florida coast, they hit a reef, and one of the engines failed. They slowed to a creep. The sun rose, and they became visible. “That’s when a plane came over, and they saw us,” recalls Osbek. The boat was achingly close to the shore. “The water wasn’t dark but light blue. And we could see the beach.” Out of nowhere came a pair of U.S. Coast Guard cutters. Everyone in the boat knew that if they got to the beach they were free—they’d be granted asylum. But no one thought to swim for it, mainly because the cutters had big guns trained on them. “The Coast Guard shot bullets into the engine that turned it off.”

Osbek was taken off one boat and put onto another, where, for the next six days, he was questioned by various Americans in uniforms. He begged them to take him to Guantánamo, but they handed him back to the Cuban authorities instead. “The first Cuban police guy I talked to asked, ‘What are you going to do now that you can never play baseball again?’ ” What he was going to do was try to get out again. In Cuba, not only was he banned from baseball, but his former teammates didn’t want to be seen with him or even talk to him on their cell phones. He was at risk of being jailed. He didn’t know who Javier was, but prayed that he’d call again. He was the only hope of getting out of Cuba.

Getting into Cuba, it turns out, is also a problem, especially if you have anything to do with baseball. It may still be possible to sneak in, but you’d be insane to try. The governments of the United States and Cuba now agree on at least one thing: Americans with a commercial interest in springing Cuban ballplayers should be jailed for pursuing it. Gus Dominguez is now serving a five-year sentence in a California prison. In 1996 another American sports agent, Juan Ignacio Hernandez, was sentenced to 15 years in a Cuban jail for traveling to Cuba and trying to persuade ballplayers to leave. “When you roll into Havana and they figure out you’re from Major League Baseball,” says the Braves’ McMichael, “right away they shut you down. I’ve seen guys try it. I’ve seen guys try to get a radar gun in [to clock pitches]. And they get put right back on the plane going out. To know what a Cuban player is is now just this side of impossible. You can’t legally lay your eyes on them.” The Florida jury that convicted Dominguez was onto something: the flow of information and of baseball players out of Cuba is slower now than it has been in a long time. “What’s strange about Cuba,” says agent Joe Kehoskie, “is that the money given to Cuban defectors is increasing. But the number of Cuban defectors is decreasing.”

You aren’t even likely to be allowed to enter Cuba as an American baseball journalist—at least not without an extraordinary amount of hassling from the Cuban government, which, since Fidel took ill, has become much more vigilant in preventing foreign reporters from going where they want to go and seeing who they want to see. But there remains a path from the outside into Cuban baseball. It runs through Canada—specifically through a 59-year-old retired high-school history teacher named Kit Krieger.

Krieger lives in Vancouver, where for 17 years he taught in the public schools. In 1997, by what he describes as a series of accidents, he was elected head of British Columbia’s 41,000-member teachers’ union. He began a tradition of sending teachers and school supplies to Cuba twice a year. “Because of Cuba’s isolation they have very few friends,” says Krieger, “and my union quickly became Cuba’s best friend.” Much as he loved teaching, Krieger loved baseball more. He isn’t an ordinary fan. He is the sort who when asked for the date Babe Ruth made his debut not only will give it to you off the top of his head, but will also list the lineups of both teams, along with their batting averages for that year. He is also the sort of fan who from a shockingly young age hounded professional baseball players for autographs. When he was 13 he leaned over the outfield wall and asked Joe DiMaggio what it was like to be married to Marilyn Monroe. (DiMaggio ignored him.) “Mickey Mantle told me to fuck off once,” he says with a hint of pride.

There were no official Friends of Cuban Baseball, and so Kit Krieger became an unofficial one. “I have the largest collection of Cuban-autograph baseballs in Canada,” he says. “The second-largest is 31 million people tied, with none.” Once he went to Cuba with paper and pencils and schoolbooks; now he goes with bats and balls and gloves. He meets with team managers and players and league officials. He became close friends with Communist Party officials who shared his love of baseball.

Kit Krieger at his home, in Vancouver. Photograph by Art Streiber.

It strains the resources of a retired schoolteacher living on his pension to medicate half of Cuba’s old-timers and equip some large number of young Cuban baseball players, and creates domestic problems in the bargain. “My wife thinks I’m being used,” he says. “And she’s right. I am being used. But so what? These people have nothing.” In 2001, to supplement his pension, he created a small company, called Cubaball, to introduce baseball fanatics to Cuba. Most of the people who go on these trips aren’t anyone’s idea of normal. They all know more than any human being should about Cuban baseball history, and perform, for the benefit of the locals, astonishing feats. One day, for instance, they drove three hours from Havana to a town called Cruces. Cruces is the burial place of Cuba’s most legendary pre-revolutionary player, Martín Dihigo. (He’s the only player in the Hall of Fame in three countries: the U.S.A., Mexico, and Cuba.) They’d hoped to find Dihigo’s tomb, but this proved difficult, and as they wandered around town they stumbled upon a museum of local interest. Inside they met the director, who said he had a box of memorabilia donated by Dihigo’s son. The director had no idea what most of it was. “Dihigo was forgotten,” said the Cuban interpreter who told me of the incident. “Dihigo’s tomb was forgotten. Dihigo’s son handed a box of old stuff to the museum, but they didn’t know what any of it was. So, Kit fished a baseball with signatures on it out of the box and started to read the names: Carl Erskine. Rafael Noble. Silvio García. Solly Hemus. Lefty Gomez. He knew every player. He knew their batting averages. He knew their career histories. In less than five minutes he looked up and said, ‘Cienfuegos, 1947–48.’ ” (Cienfuegos was a Cuban winter-league team.)

The local museum’s box of unidentifiable objects became a roomful of exhibits, with detailed labels and interesting footnotes. Silvio García, Kit explains, “was the great Cuban player removed from the list of players who might be used to break the [U.S. major-league] color barrier, because of his response to the question ‘How would you respond if a white player called you a nigger?’ ” García said he’d beat the crap out of him. How could Cuba simply forget him?

The Cuban government treats this baseball obsessive with something like respectful indifference. So long as he brings money to Cuba and doesn’t meddle with the chief political assets, young ballplayers, it welcomes him. They allow him to excavate whatever he wants of Cuba’s baseball past. Their official lack of interest in pre-revolutionary professional baseball has given way to some unofficial curiosity. Kit Krieger is a bit like a guy who wanders into your house and takes a deep interest in the beige wall-to-wall carpeting that you yourself have never actually noticed and, after calling it a rare collector’s item, begins a disquisition on the shade of beige, the length of the pile, and so on. By the time he’s done you can barely stand to walk on the thing. Whenever Krieger visits Cuba now the sports ministry dutifully rounds up whatever old-timers are still alive and creaking for his delighted inspection—but you get the sense that this is basically the only time anyone pays them any attention. Driving past the ballpark our first morning in Havana, Kit spots a little old man standing in the street. There is no game this day, nothing happening inside the park. The poor fellow looks to be either homeless or lost. “Ernesto!” shouts Kit, leaping from the taxi. The man turns, delighted to be recognized. “His name is Ernesto Morilla,” Kit explains, “and in an exhibition game in 1946 he struck out Stan Musial.”

“Musial just threw the bat and said, ‘Son of a bitch,’ ” Morilla recalls with a little grin. “ ‘Curveball.’ ”

My third day in Havana there is a game, and we arrive at the ballpark just as it is meant to start. The drive has taken longer than expected, and Kit was uncharacteristically late. (“Sorry,” he’d said as he trotted from the elevator. “I’m monitoring the online auction for Dale Mitchell’s 1953 Cleveland Indians jersey.… Dale Mitchell is the guy Don Larsen struck out to end the 1956 perfect game. Checked swing.”) When we pull up we find that the game is delayed for lack of a policeman to open the gate. The day is hot, the gate is locked, and several hundred men are clamoring to get in. Today the Havana Metros—one of Osbek Castillo’s former employers—will play the team from Villa Clara, on a baseball diamond that has been built in the middle of the grounds of the Hospital Psiquiátrico de la Habana. “We could probably think up a whole team of major-leaguers who belong here,” says Kit. “The All-Insane team.” He begins to list the many baseball players who were certifiable. “Jimmy Piersall playing center field … ” But before he can finish, the police appear and open the gate. A cheer goes up and the crowd rushes in.

Behind home plate are parked three Chinese-made bicycles—two of which turn out to belong to players, who had pedaled to the ballpark on them. Roaming around freely are several chickens, a gaggle of mental patients, and a few doctors in hospital greens. The foul lines are not painted but laid upon the field, in strips of old rubber tires painted white. Just off the field, down the foul lines, are the long, single-story hospital buildings, presumably filled with Cuban lunatics. But the most unsettling aspect of the place, for an American baseball fan, is the concession stand.

It may be possible to create a daily economic life more confusing than Fidel Castro has concocted in Cuba, but you’d have to work at it. Start with the money. Inside of 15 years, the U.S. dollar has gone from being illegal to legal to banned from use. René Arocha made up his mind to defect after his uncle was sentenced to two years in prison for the possession of a $5 bill. Three years later $5 bills were perfectly legal. On the street two different currencies are traded, both called pesos. One kind of peso is what the locals get paid and is worth roughly four cents, while the other is what foreigners are given when they fork over their euros at the foreign-exchange centers, and is worth roughly a dollar. All prices are in pesos, but even the locals are sometimes not sure if the peso in question is the four-cent kind or the dollar one. The rule of thumb is that when a vendible good resembles even remotely the sort of thing one might actually desire or a thing only a tourist would buy, the price tag implies expensive pesos. A copy of Che Guevara’s memoir of the revolution costs 20 tourist pesos, or the monthly salary of a Cuban doctor. A cheap Cuisinart costs 54.50 tourist pesos, a boom box 329.25, and for 109 of these dear pesos, or six months’ salary of a tenured professor of international economy at the University of Havana, you can dine alone on the roof of the newly renovated Hotel Saratoga, survey the ruin of Havana, and contemplate the consequences of anti-materialism.

But down on the streets you can never be sure. As this is my first Cuban baseball game, I failed to anticipate that a Cuban ballpark is, in effect, a tourist-free zone. Up in the stands are three ladies with trays of peanuts and cookies and whatnot. I grab a few sacks of peanuts and some weirdly wrapped cookies and ask them how much for the lot. “Five pesos,” they say, and so I give them five of what the foreign-exchange lady at the Havana airport had given me. Wrong! I’d paid them 25 times the going rate for peanuts and cookies, and the ladies are so delighted and startled that they try to give me their entire store. It is sweet, really. They don’t correct me or make change, but they feel guilty about just stealing my money and so begin piling up vast quantities of what appear to be the world’s most toxic foodstuffs: Cheetos without cheese, strangely flavorless chocolate wafers, and various other Michael Pollan nightmares. They stop only when it becomes clear we have reached the limit of what I can haul back to my seat.

A game at Santiago de Cuba’s Estadio Guillermón Moncada in April. Photograph by Sven Creutzmann/reportage by Getty Images.

What’s even odder is what is not sold: souvenirs. It’s hard to imagine an American baseball game without jerseys and autographed balls and bobble-head dolls being hawked for outrageous sums. There’s none of that in Cuba. Walking into the main Havana stadium one night, I come upon a crowd of several hundred people, gazing into the side of a trailer. It is dark, and the only light emanates from inside. It is as if the baby Jesus had been reborn and people had come for miles to see him. But what the people are gazing upon, taped to the wall of the trailer, are baseball caps. Six ersatz caps bearing the logo of Havana’s main team, Industriales, to be exact. Nothing else. Just six caps. I assume the crowd is in line to buy the caps, but at three tourist pesos a pop they are far too expensive for Cubans. The crowd gathered not to buy but to stare at the caps. It is the first time since the revolution that the crass capitalist act of selling souvenirs has been permitted at Cuba’s most famous baseball stadium.

On the field the finances become, if anything, more bewildering. Officially the players aren’t paid at all for playing baseball but for some other “job” they hold. “Coach,” say, or “sports counselor.” For their phony jobs they get 250 Cuban pesos a month. The 520 players in the Cuban National Series receive, in total, $60,000 a year. In theory, the entire Cuban league could be bankrolled with roughly one-seventh of the salary of a rookie big-league benchwarmer.

Like everyone else in Cuba, baseball players earn far less than a human being can survive on. And like every other Cuban, to cover the difference between what they need to live on and what they are paid by their government jobs, the players turn to the black market. Playing baseball is just the loss leader that gets them into their actual trade: retailer of stolen baseball merchandise. Before he fled on a boat and into the arms of Gus Dominguez, for instance, Industriales pitcher Yoankis Turino pilfered baseballs, forged the autographs of his teammates on them, and flogged them to tourists for $5 a pop. A player’s labor may belong to the state, but his jersey, at the end of the season, is his to keep: after the two seasons he played with Industriales, Osbek Castillo sold his for $30. The jersey of a lesser player on a bad team might fetch as little as $5, but that of a big star might sell for $50. The jersey for a national-team member is worth twice the jersey of a Cuban Series team, and a jersey sold outside of Cuba goes for multiples of a jersey inside Cuba. In the last World Cup, a pitcher with a 95-m.p.h. fastball, named Pedro Luis Lazo, was caught by a Cuban-government official in the lobby of his Taipei hotel selling his uniform to a Taiwanese businessman for $217.

All this goes on with the more or less full knowledge of the authorities, who use that knowledge to instill fear in the players. The 2006 Cuban batting title was won by a 27-year-old named Michel Enríquez. This year he’s not on any roster, and word is that he’s been suspended. No one knows why—no one ever knows why. But it’s a fair bet that he got caught selling something on the open market that he shouldn’t have—probably his baseball talent.

At any rate, the ruling idea in Cuban baseball is that the players are not only amateurs but interchangeable. Stars are unimportant; team is everything. But there’s nothing like a baseball field to remind you that all men are not created equal. A few, when they walk onto a field, might as well own it. As it happens, one of these players is here today, only he’s no longer a player. He’s the manager of the visiting team, Villa Clara. Like his players, he’s dressed head to toe in what appear to be Halloween-orange pajamas. (“The Oranges” is Villa Clara’s team name.) Although his players get little attention, half the people in the stands are pointing at him while he pretends that they aren’t.

Soon everyone is either looking at or pointing to or chatting about Víctor Mesa. Mesa is one of the few baseball people in Cuba who can be fairly described as a living legend. As a center-fielder he was widely regarded as not only supremely gifted but totally nuts—the sort of player to whom no fly ball was so insignificant that he wouldn’t crash into a wall to catch it. He was the only player in Cuba who routinely stole home—and he’d yell as he was stealing it. He was one of the few Cuban players with a nickname, and by some measure the most popular player on the island. Hearts of 50-year-old Cuban women still flutter when they describe watching Víctor Mesa play ball. It’s fair to say that he never played against anyone better than he was. He was on the Cuban team that played against the United States in the Amateur World Series in 1984. Mesa was 24 at the time, and Barry Bonds, on the U.S. team, was 20. The Cuban team won, and Mesa was the M.V.P. “He wouldn’t have been just a regular in the All-Star Game,” says René Arocha. “He would have been the star of the All-Star Game.” “He would have been more than a star in professional baseball,” says Eddie Oropesa, who, before he climbed the fence in Buffalo, surrendered to Mesa his 200th home run. “He was a show. He would do things other people wouldn’t even think of doing.” After he’d tried—and failed—to talk Víctor Mesa into becoming an American citizen, Gus Dominguez saw one of those things at one of the international tournaments. Mesa hit leadoff and was the first batter of Cuba’s first game. Before the first pitch Mesa turned and began to argue with the umpire. The first pitch he hit out of the park. After he rounded the bases and touched home plate, he turned back to the umpire to argue some more. The umpire tossed him out of the game.

A penchant for arguing with the umps isn’t usually a recipe for success in a police state. But Víctor Mesa’s new career as a baseball manager has made his playing career seem measured and balanced. He’s been thrown out of more games than all the other Cuban managers put together. Once, he got himself thrown out of a game before it started, which is hard to do. (The umpire was warning him in advance not to make trouble or come out on the field, to which Mesa replied, “Are you fucking blind? I’m on the field right now.”)

Before the game starts we find Mesa down on the field, looking troubled, though when he sees Kit Krieger he brightens and throws his arm around him. He has the animal elegance of someone who was clearly once a marvelous athlete, and one of those bodies that could have played any game well but because he had been born in Cuba was destined for baseball. (When he was nine years old two Cuban-government officials spotted him playing in the streets and packed him off to a baseball academy.) With a huge grin he apologizes for his state of mind (gloomy, he swears), but it can’t be helped. What troubles him is exactly what troubles U.S. big-league managers: kids these days. “You have to tell them the same things over and over,” he says, pointing to his team, huddled in the outfield around the team’s psychiatrist. (All Cuban teams have a psychiatrist, but perhaps none is so usefully employed as Villa Clara’s.) “I have headaches from shouting at them.” In case Kit has missed his point, Mesa rubs his head and winces. It’s a handsome 47-year-old head, the color of café con leche, perched on a thick, strong neck.

Hard as he is on umpires, Víctor Mesa is harder on players. He has been known to rush out onto the field in the middle of innings to physically pull his players off it when they show less than perfect commitment to their jobs. The Villa Clara fans, when displeased by his relentless hard-assedness, carry a casket around with Víctor Mesa’s name on the side.

A few minutes later the game begins, and it’s clearly a mismatch. One big difference between Cuban and American baseball is that Cuban players must play for the province in which they were born. This creates an imbalance much like the financial imbalance in Major League Baseball. Havana has a lot more people than any other province, and so it tends to have a disproportionate share of the better players. The Metros are the Cuban baseball authorities’ answer to this: a second Havana team. The first team is Industriales, the most famous team in Cuba. In theory, having to field two teams should force Havana to dilute its talent; in practice, because the Havana officials who run the thing want to win, it concentrates it. The Metros are used as a farm team for Industriales—a place for raw youth and decrepit old age. The minute a Metro looks promising, he becomes an Industriale. If the Industriales are the New York Yankees of Cuba, the Metros are the Pittsburgh Pirates. Their seasons begin without hope and end with relief.

The Metros’ pitcher’s first pitch hits the Villa Clara batter. The next batter whacks a grounder that bounces over the Metros’ second-baseman’s glove; the guy after him lines a shot between the right-fielder’s legs. Thus begins the rout. The game started at 1:15; when the 1:45 Air Canada flight to Toronto takes off from the José Martí airport, just behind the center-field wall, we’re still in the top of the first inning, and the Metros are down by four runs. Alcohol is banned, but the Metro fans drink anyway—rum from unmarked bottles. This is the moment they’ve waited for, when the Metros have earned the insults they have come to holler at them.

“Hey, don’t you have food in your town?!” (at the skinny pitcher).

“When’s the last time you got laid?” (after the muffed ground ball).

The place is small enough that every remark is heard and appreciated, and pretty soon everybody is hollering and laughing. The players don’t even pretend to be indifferent. Particularly ripe jabs are greeted with laughter in both dugouts. When a fight breaks out in the stands, players come out of the dugout and crane their necks to watch. When a fan takes a foul ball off his forehead, the players come out again, to gawk. Here is one effect of keeping money out of sports: it lessens the distance between the players and the fans. The players are as poor as the people who watch them, and in many cases poorer. For anything above and beyond their meager salaries they depend on the generosity of these fans. “When it rains,” says Kit, “I’ve seen the players just come into the stands and sit with the fans until it stops.”

“If Víctor Mesa had fucked your mother you might be good!” someone shouts. And even Víctor Mesa leans out and laughs.

But he quickly goes back to being serious. Even though his team is winning, he frowns, he stomps, he cheers, and he rages, and in general lets his players know that life with Víctor Mesa will be exciting, but not easy. “If I let the players do what they want,” he says, “they’re screwed. They will not be anyone, and they will go back to the street. And there is nothing on the street.” But, for his better players, the street is not the only option. After Industriales, Mesa’s Villa Clara team vies for the lead in an important stat: player defections. Live through a season with Víctor Mesa and a few days on a raft surrounded by sharks doesn’t seem so terrifying. Mesa’s shortstop and catcher were banned from baseball for speaking on the phone with Cuban defectors. His shortstop Yuniesky Betancourt hopped a boat to Florida one night in 2003. Established as Seattle’s starting shortstop two seasons ago, Betancourt was asked if he had problems adjusting to big-league managers. “We have a manager in Cuba, and that manager is worse than anything you have in the major leagues,” Betancourt replied. “His name is Víctor Mesa.”

An invisible line runs from Víctor Mesa, yelling from his dugout, to Gus Dominguez, in his cell inside a California prison. For the one thing that the U.S. attorney general and the jailed sports agent agree upon is that all the trouble began when Yuniesky Betancourt fled Víctor Mesa’s ball club.

After the trial, the prosecutors said privately that Gus Dominguez’s biggest mistake was to try to tell his story to the jury. On the stand Dominguez struck his prosecutors as naïve and unprepared. He was dressed in black, for instance, which no one trying to seem innocent does. Under cross-examination he came across as pushy and even indignant, rather than contrite. Before the trial he’d declined the government’s plea deal on the grounds that he’d done nothing wrong: the first he’d heard of the five Cuban players he was accused of smuggling, he says, is when his former client (and New York Yankee) Andy Morales called and told him they were in Miami and needed his help.

To his jury, Dominguez told an outlandish story that no one had heard before. The whole problem started, he explained, with Yuniesky Betancourt. Like every other Cuban ballplayer, Betancourt, when he landed in Florida, needed help. He’d gotten in touch with a friend, Atlanta Braves catcher Brayan Peña, who sent him to Gus Dominguez. Dominguez arranged for Betancourt to move to Mexico and train with a winter-ball team while he cut a deal on his behalf with the Seattle Mariners—which came in at $3.8 million guaranteed, with another million or so in incentives. For Betancourt to join the Mariners, all they needed was the approval of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which must sign off on any deal between Major League Baseball teams and Cubans. As he waited for Betancourt to return from Mexico, Dominguez told the court, he got a call from the man who had served as a go-between for Betancourt’s smugglers. His real name was Ysbel Medina-Santos, but baseball players in Cuba knew him as Javier.

Medina-Santos told Dominguez that Betancourt had promised to pay his smugglers 5 percent of his first major-league contract. They heard he had a deal with the Mariners, and they wanted their money. Now. The contract was unenforceable, but the smugglers were prepared to collect on their own. If Dominguez didn’t pay them, Medina-Santos threatened, they’d break Betancourt’s legs and end his career. What point would there be in that? Dominguez asked. Break his legs and you’ll never get your money. Medina-Santos seemed to agree with him. But then, a few hours later, he called back and said if they didn’t get their money they were coming after Dominguez and his kids. Those kids were both students at Tulane University, where they were planning careers in law enforcement. They sat in the Key West courtroom, hearing this story for the first time, from their father on the witness stand. The daughter, Desiree, says, “I thought, What’s happened to our family? We used to be so normal.” Now she was hearing that her life had been threatened to pay for the Seattle Mariners’ shortstop’s boat ride from Cuba. Her dad tried to explain to the jury why he’d never told his children, his wife, his business partner, or, for that matter, the F.B.I. of this threat. He’d kept it to himself and paid the Cuban smugglers because he feared what they might do if he didn’t.

It all sounded too bizarre to be true, but the only contradictory evidence was the testimony of this deeply shady character, Ysbel Medina-Santos. Medina-Santos had come from jail to the courtroom and would go right back afterward. On the stand he admitted to so many crimes the audience lost track: insurance fraud, Medicare fraud, tax evasion, theft. He’d done jail time in Florida for dealing drugs and was about to do more. Even one of the prosecutors described him privately as “a scumbag.” But he was all they had. In exchange for a greatly reduced prison sentence, he swore that the $225,000 Gus Dominguez had wired into his account was for picking up from a beach in Cuba and ferrying to the Florida Keys five Cuban baseball players selected by the Los Angeles sports agent.

Part of Kit Krieger’s collection of autographed Cuban baseballs. Photograph by Art Streiber.

It was the smuggler’s word against the agent’s, and there was really only one person who might have broken the tie: Yuniesky Betancourt. The Dominguez side never called him as a witness, mainly because they had no idea what he might say. He’d already told three different stories, two of them to immigration agents, about how and when he’d come to the United States. He declined to return phone calls, and slammed the door in the face of the private eye they’d hired to track him down. As his former agent went to trial, Víctor Mesa’s old shortstop was back in Seattle, playing in their home opener. And on top of it all, he’d unwittingly provided the U.S. government with an explanation for why Gus Dominguez needed to smuggle ballplayers in from Cuba: to make back the money he’d lost on Betancourt—for, having stiffed his smugglers, Betancourt then stiffed the agent who had fed and housed him for six months. He signed the contract with the Mariners that Dominguez had negotiated on his behalf, but paid whatever commission he paid to someone else. (A grievance regarding the allocation of the commission is ongoing.) The money Dominguez lost on Betancourt, the U.S. government argued, threw his business into disarray. He became desperate—so desperate that he ordered up five more players from Cuba.

And was now in jail for it. The U.S. attorney treated his conviction as an explanation. But it wasn’t; they never even really tried to get to the bottom of what exactly happened in the black market for Cuban ballplayers. They didn’t determine, for instance, who ultimately wound up pocketing Dominguez’s $225,000. (They still don’t know.) The original indictment accused Dominguez of actually having been in the motorboat that fetched the players from Cuba, but then it turned out he was in New Orleans at the time, dropping his kids off at college. In the end the prosecutors claimed that Dominguez had given the money to Medina-Santos, who distributed it to the people who did the dirty work.

Those people, whoever they were, may have learned a lesson from their experience with Yuniesky Betancourt: once a Cuban player was loose in the United States, he couldn’t be relied on to fork over 5 percent of his big-league paychecks for an illegal, five-hour boat ride. A year after Betancourt crawled ashore in Florida another group of players landed. They were met by their smugglers, who then set out to auction them to agents. One agent, Joe Kehoskie, says he got a phone call from a defector’s girlfriend telling him that some Cuban ballplayers had arrived and asking if he’d like to represent them. He flew down, was picked up at his hotel by the woman and driven to one of the smugglers’ houses, where he found a lawyer, two smugglers, and six Cuban baseball players. One of the players Kehoskie knew: Yunel Escobar, then backup shortstop for Industriales (and now the starting shortstop for the Atlanta Braves). “The smugglers said, ‘We can let you represent them if you pay us 150 grand,’ ” recalls Kehoskie. The players had just arrived by boat, had been collected on the U.S. shore by smugglers, and without a dime in their pockets or a word of English at their disposal were at their mercy. “The players were effectively being held hostage until someone paid to have them freed,” says Kehoskie. “This wasn’t a referral fee. It was ransom. A member of the Florida bar was sitting in the room, helping them to arrange their smuggling fee, so they could get out of there. It was one of those only-in-Miami moments.”

Havana’s Estadio Latinoamericano is a 50,000-seat stadium that seems like a slightly run-down version of a big American stadium until you realize something’s missing: a parking lot. Cuban baseball is very nearly carbon-neutral. The fans arrive by bicycle or on foot or haphazardly attached to the back of whatever pickup trucks happen to be passing this way. And so it comes as a shock when out of nowhere roars a bright-orange BMW. Inside is Víctor Mesa, still in his pumpkin-orange uniform. His team just finished another whooping of the Metros, 18–4, and is filing onto its bus, probably relieved that their manager isn’t coming along to tell them what they did wrong. “Come over to my house tonight and we’ll drink rum,” Mesa shouts, tossing out his address, and then zooms off into the night.

Mesa’s house turns out to be something more than a house. It’s not quite a mansion, but close. Havana is a spectacular ruin; it’s as if someone had glued together the 10 richest, oldest residential neighborhoods in America and passed a law forbidding anyone to touch them for 50 years. The number of Víctor Mesa’s house is gone, but beside it there’s a green metal gate, chained and locked, and on the other side is the bright-orange BMW. Cars are precious here—a Cuban can buy his own car only after he’s convinced the authorities that he’s earned the money in Cuba. They’ll sit and look at how much you’ve made, deduct some plausible sum for living expenses, and conclude whether or not you could possibly have saved enough—which of course you couldn’t have on what you’ve been legally paid. And so Víctor Mesa’s car, like Víctor Mesa’s life, is a tribute to his guile. “I don’t know very many stupid Cubans,” Kit Krieger says as we bang on the front door. “Here you have to know the system in detail or you’re in trouble.”

The car doesn’t go with the house, because the car is in peak condition and shines, while the house, on the outside, hasn’t been painted or improved or repaired in any way since the revolution. But then the door swings open onto what might as well be another world. Pink-and-white marble gleams. The tablecloths are lace. The appliances are new, though of odd or indeterminate brand. (Could there really be such a thing as a Frigidaire TV?) The kitchen is indistinguishable from a kitchen in a million-dollar American home: there’s even an island. Martini and wine glasses hang from wooden racks. I’ve seen bigger houses, but foot for foot there can be no house back in the Free World with more stuff inside it. The paintings, portraits of Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe and John Lennon, climb all the way up the 15-foot walls and nearly touch the pristine crown molding. Two are almost too large to fit: one of a bat and a ball, another of Mesa scaling a palm tree to catch a fly ball.

“It looks like I was born with God,” says Víctor Mesa now, reading my mind. “I’ve been very lucky.” He points to a big painting of himself. “That’s a $25,000 painting. A gift from the artist. Even if I only sell it for $5,000, he just gives me another for free.” This is another little wrinkle in the Cuban economy: art arbitrage. Artists can sell what they create in Cuba abroad, and they pay little tax. In Cuba, it’s the artists who get rich.

Kit has found a book of Cuban baseball statistics in a local bookstore, and it’s now open on his lap. As Víctor Mesa opens a bottle of rum, Kit flips through it. No 59-year-old man ever looked more like a 10-year-old boy.

“Ask me anything you want!” says Mesa.

“You earn 300 Cuban pesos a month?” I ask. Eleven bucks.

“Less!” he says.

“Then how the hell did you get all this stuff?”

It takes him a while to explain. At the end of his Cuban playing career, he says, he was still poor. But the Cuban government allowed him, as it has a few other big stars, to play for a couple of years in China. Castro rents out his baseball players after they cease to be of use to the national team, just as he rents out his doctors and teachers to Venezuela, in exchange for cheap oil. These years abroad were given to Mesa in the spirit of a gift, but the Cuban government nevertheless kept 90 percent of his foreign earnings. The real gift was allowing him to inflict his charm and energy on rich foreigners. By the time he came home he had a harem of financial backers. “Everyone wanted to be my friend,” he explains, plausibly. Among his friends is a wealthy Spaniard who still sends him big sums.

Throughout his career he’d been offered many little hints that government people officially disapproved of him: gratuitous slights in sanctioned histories of the Cuban game, forced early retirement as a player, and a long wait before he was granted his rightful place as a coach on the national team. But no one ever succeeded in shutting him up or making him any less happy to be alive. The Cuban defector and former Red Sox bullpen coach Euclides Rojas recalls that the morning after René Arocha defected, as the rest of the Cuban national team flew back to Cuba, Víctor Mesa leapt from his seat to dress down the Cuban-government officials. “He shouted, ‘I hope you learn from this. I hope you learn that you need to treat us better.’ ” When Ariel Prieto failed to make the 1992 Cuban Olympic team it was Mesa who told him that he should flee to the United States. “He came to me,” recalls Prieto, “and he said, ‘You better get the hell out of here. You can play in the big leagues.’ Before that no one talked to me about it. Everyone was scared.” When star second-baseman Rey Anglada was thrown in jail for refusing to testify against teammates who’d been accused of gambling, Mesa was the only player in Cuba to publicly voice his outrage.

“You had 2,171 hits,” says Kit, looking up from his stats book, as if Mesa didn’t know. “And that’s in a 90-game season.” There are 162 games in a major-league season, so if you want to compare the career stats you need to multiply the Cuba ones by roughly 1.8.

The member of Cuba’s version of the 3,000-hit club drains a glass of rum.

“You’re second all-time in Cuba in stolen bases,” says Kit, “and famous for going in with your spikes up.”

Mesa frowns. “There was a bad thing about the way I played,” he says seriously. “I wouldn’t respect my opponent.”

Mesa leans forward. His forearms are thick, the forearms of a construction worker. “I’ll tell you something and this is true,” says Víctor Mesa. “When I was a little boy in Sagua, it was just my mother and three kids. It doesn’t mean I have more conscience than anyone else, but we were very poor. When I didn’t have anything, I still got everything for free. I got the education for free. I got a place to live for free. I got food for free. I didn’t have to pay a cent for any of it. That’s what I had on my mind. There was a [major league] scout who would tell me, ‘Víctor, youth is just one stage. You’re not going to be young forever. If you come to the major leagues, you can make money to take care of yourself when you are no longer young.’ But I couldn’t: my head wouldn’t let me do anything else. It wasn’t political. It was my conscience. My mother, before she died, asked me not to leave Cuba. She didn’t know anything about sports. She said, ‘You could make lots of money, but I don’t want you to leave.’ So no one made me think the way I did.”

He means it. Víctor Mesa may have had the best defense a Cuban ballplayer can have against his government: he actually believed in the revolution. In this one respect he perhaps was not a total freak. The great players of his generation, for whom leaving would have been as easy as walking out of a foreign hotel room, stayed in Cuba. They did what they did for love rather than money. But then, the money wasn’t what it is now. And Cuba was not what it is now.

It’s taken the better part of three hours, but I finally ask the question that makes Víctor Mesa uneasy: “Would you stay here if you were 21 right now?”

Instead of answering, he leads us to his trophy room. It’s not decorated but stuffed with more awards and honors than would seem possible for one man to earn in a lifetime. There are half a dozen pictures of Víctor Mesa with Fidel Castro, and a few others of Víctor Mesa with Fidel’s brother and current Cuban president, Raul Castro. Scattered among these are pictures of American ballplayers: Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle. “I love American baseball,” Mesa says. “It’s the best baseball in the world. And, yes, I would have loved to play in the major leagues. I would have loved to be with all these big players and see just how good I was. I am going to die and I’m not going to know.”

That’s when I spot the picture of Mesa with his former shortstop Yuniesky Betancourt. Even now in Cuba, ballplayers who defect are officially forgotten. Their stats are stricken from the record books, and their names aren’t meant to be spoken. And yet here stands Víctor Mesa with his arm draped over the shoulders of the kid who is now the Seattle Mariners’ shortstop. “He was like my son,” says Mesa. “My very, very difficult son.”

It is past two in the morning when we finally stumble back onto the street, but Víctor Mesa is still full of energy. He follows us out and insists on giving us a lift even though we lie and swear to him that we’re fine and can find our way back to the hotel. Unchaining the precious BMW, he leaps behind the wheel and drives after us and badgers us to climb in. Even sober he drives like a madman, and now that he has had more than a few glasses of rum he’s more confident of his ability to do 90 on Havana’s broken streets. Perhaps to slow him down Kit mentions that he plans to be in Seattle soon and hopes to look up Yuniesky Betancourt. “Would you like for me to carry a message to him?” he asks.

“Tell him I said, ‘Don’t smoke and don’t blow it,’ ” says Mesa.

He’s still pushing 90, and I’m gripping various handles as tightly as I can, as if that will help. “If you crash this thing and we all die,” I finally say, “how would they play it in the newspapers?”

“They’d say, ‘A bunch of foreigners died with Víctor Mesa,’ ” he laughs, and floors the gas pedal.

One afternoon I sneak away from Kit Krieger and visit the man who runs the U.S. Special Interests Section—which is what we have there instead of an embassy. His name is Michael Parmly, and he lives in a mansion outside of Havana. There I stumble into a creepy conversation with an ambassador from a European country (who asked that I not mention which one). His fellow Eastern Europeans in Cuba, he says, all share the same feeling: it feels like their own countries just before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Tense. A very anxious state police is monitoring the population with special vigilance. “They are a very efficient secret police,” he says. “They learned from the Stasi.”

“How do you know?” I ask.

“We know,” he says.

“Yes, but how?”

“We send information back to test it,” he says. “They’ve never failed to intercept it.”

“What do they know?”

“They know everything,” he says. “They know for example that you are an American journalist and are here right now.”

Which is the creepy part.

And if true, then they also know that an American journalist using a Canadian baseball nut as his cover and looking for Cuban baseball players worth stealing has found a rare rental car in Havana and talked a bright young Cuban into driving him across the country, unsupervised, with stops at various baseball games.

On either side of the highway as you leave Havana you see to the horizon fields now fallow that under better management would be making someone rich. Much closer, right beside the highway, you see Cubans selling the items most easily pilfered from the government and resold on the black market—fruit, milk, eggs, giant cheese rounds, live turkeys—while everyone from small schoolchildren to little old ladies waits for buses that run only in theory. On the road itself you see horses, mule-drawn carts, bicycles, army jeeps, ancient tractors, sugarcane cutters, and Soviet dump trucks belching hot black smoke. What you don’t see is anything resembling an automobile. The moment we leave Havana, in a 2003 Korean-made rental car, we become an object of wild curiosity. Everyone we pass stares in to see what sort of important person must be inside this exotic vehicle. “They probably think we’re either artists or musicians or maybe famous baseball players,” says the young Cuban guide I’d talked into coming with me.

By the time I reach the province of Camagüey—birthplace of Gus Dominguez—I’ve seen almost all the Cuban teams, talked to managers and players, and gotten a general sense of the caliber of play (high). But there are two things, in addition to cars, that I never saw. One is other tourists, who seem to be well imprisoned either in Havana or at beach resorts. The other is journalists. I’d been to a dozen games but had yet to encounter a single Cuban reporter. The games are on national television, they get written about in the national paper and get argued about on the streets—and yet no one interviews baseball managers or players. “The journalists don’t even want to talk to us,” the Camagüey manager tells me. “They think they know everything. I tell my players: Don’t read or listen to them. They don’t know anything.”

Tonight, Camagüey will face the hated Industriales, whose fan base makes the Yankees’ seem docile. My young Cuban traveling companion is a rabid Industriales fan. After I’ve dragged him down to the team’s dugout he still can’t believe he’s there, standing next to his heroes. But to know who they are he needs to see their numbers. Their faces he doesn’t recognize: he’s never seen them before. There are no TV close-ups, and there are no newspaper profiles. They never appear on posters, because there are no posters, and they never appear in product endorsements, because there are no products, and even if there were, it would be against the law to endorse them. The Cuban baseball fan knows every name and every statistic, just like an American fan, but he can walk past his favorite player in broad daylight without a hint of recognition. And the journalists haven’t the slightest interest in changing that—even though there’s no law stopping them. “Sometimes we ask them to come down so that they can write something they know rather than something they think,” says Industriales manager Rey Anglada. “But they usually don’t come.”

The upshot is that Cuban baseball games go undescribed. The papers tell you who won and who lost, who hit and who didn’t. The columnists froth and fume. But you never read anything about what actually happened—which is a shame, because a great deal often does. Major disruptions don’t cost anyone much, so far less effort goes into preventing them. Take the ball boy, for instance, who is always at risk of running out of baseballs. Before every Cuban game the ball boy sets himself up in a folding chair, about 15 feet behind home plate, and puts his life on the line for his country. He wears no helmet or protective gear of any kind and is usually physically unsuited to evade fast-moving projectiles. Here in Camagüey the ball boy is a toothless old man named Miguelito, who spends much of the game dodging rockets and complaining about all the foul balls leaving the park. “How can you work in these conditions?” he grumbles loudly enough for the Communist Party officials to hear.

Then there is the Industriales equipment manager: before the game he discovers that he’s got no batting helmets. The government sent them a shipment but in the wrong color—brown instead of blue. And so right up until the first pitch, the poor fellow’s scouring the stands and the opposing dugout for helmets that match his team’s colors. As he does he’s watched, without interest, by the first secretary of the Communist Party of the municipality and at least half a dozen other local party officials.

You can tell who works for the government by who bothers to sing the national anthem. They belt it out while everyone else does the American thing of waiting around for it to end so that what they really care about can begin. You can also tell who works for the government by where they sit: the best seats, behind home plate, are reserved for them. Apart from that, as the game starts, much is familiar. The managers do dopey things to remind everyone they exist—like bat their best hitter seventh or bunt the D.H. in the top of the first with runners on first and second and nobody out. There are players who clearly like to get dirty and players who don’t. The catchers have the same subtle ability to distance themselves from pitchers in trouble—refusing to make eye contact as they hand him a new ball after a home run. Even the body language is the same—right down to the same startling amount of unself-conscious public crotch grabbing when things go wrong.

At the start, to the delight of the Camagüey fans, nothing goes wrong. The hated elites from Havana find themselves not only without batting helmets but also without runs—down 4–0 at the end of the first. The next six innings, however, they claw their way back, and going into the eighth inning they lead 7–6. The tension builds, and when Industriales puts men on first and second, even the government officials can’t stand it anymore. The head of sports administration for Camagüey rises from his seat behind home plate, skips down to the net behind the Camagüey dugout, and begins to holler at the Camagüey manager. Prudently, one of the coaches gets up to listen to what he has to say.

“Our first-baseman is playing too close to the line!” he shouts.

Once he got to be president, Richard Nixon had the nerve to send plays to Washington Redskins coach George Allen, but Allen didn’t pay them much attention. Here you need only to be a local party official and you get to move the first-baseman off the line.

But the first-baseman is still a bit player in this drama. The main character—the one you have to try not to watch—is the Camagüey center-fielder. He moves with the assurance of a player who knows he is the best; he sets himself apart by wearing, under his jersey, the sleeves of the Cuban national team. He runs and throws like a big-leaguer and in the first six innings makes several sensational catches in center field. He singles in one run, doubles in two more, and does everything with the grace and ease of a young man playing an imaginary game against imaginary opponents. His name, oddly for a Cuban, is Leslie Anderson. The game isn’t an hour old before it becomes clear that, whatever happens, Leslie Anderson is likely to be in the middle of it.

At least that’s how it looks to me. But it isn’t just any old opinion, it’s my opinion, and so naturally I look around for someone to inflict it upon. The only person at hand is the Communist Party official. After moving the first-baseman off the line, he’s returned to his seat behind me.

“Your center-fielder can really play,” I say, knowingly.

“Yes,” he says, indulgently. “He used to be good.”

Used to be good? Leslie Anderson has just turned 26 years old—an age when baseball players are still improving, sometimes dramatically. At the age of 23 he made the national team and played in the World Baseball Classic. (Cuba lost to Japan in the finals; the U.S.A. team, stacked with major-leaguers, didn’t place.) Later, when I mention Anderson’s name to an agent who follows Cuban baseball, he says that “if he washed up on Miami Beach he’d be a millionaire. The only question about him is his power.”

“He’s off to a bad start this season,” says the government official.

“The season’s only been going for a week!”

“We don’t like how he’s started this year,” he says. “I don’t know what’s going to happen to him.”

What Anderson thinks about this is close to unknowable. If he says the wrong thing he might find himself banished from the game he was born to play. As he leaves the on-deck circle and heads to the plate, his team down by a run and two men on base, he may be thinking about nothing more than the glory of playing for Camagüey. But, for all anyone knows, he may be wondering when he’s going to get the call telling him the boat from Florida is on its way.

Either way, it’s the bottom of the eighth inning, and the game is on the line. The kid on the mound—a reliever named Alexei Gil, brought in an inning ago—has just hit 96 m.p.h. on the radar gun. He shouldn’t have that kind of heat. He’s 21 years old, which means he was 4 in 1991, when the Soviet Union pulled its subsidies. Soon thereafter, the average weight and height of Cuban children collapsed, too. The Cold War ended, and East Germany ceased to send powdered milk, heavily discounted, in exchange for lemons. The shortage of calcium expressed itself in the bones of Cuban children, including those children who became pitchers. Thus you can count among the many consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall the temporary decline of the Cuban fastball—and a temporary reprieve granted to Cuban hitters with long, slow swings.

Leslie Anderson doesn’t need it. His body is long, but his swing is short. The fans have been dancing through much of the game. Cuban baseball is one of those rare sporting events where the spectators burn more calories than the players. Now they’re out of control, raving. Even the ancient ball boy has forgotten entirely what he’s meant to be doing and is instead screaming instructions. “Watch the damn ball!” he shouts at Anderson from 10 feet behind him. “Watch the damn ball!”

In the opposing dugout, Rey Anglada shifts forward. Every strength is a weakness and every weakness a strength: the weakness in his pitcher’s ability to throw the ball 96 m.p.h. is that he’s never had to learn how to throw anything else. Most hitters can’t catch up to his fastball. This hitter is different. For the past 10 minutes, Anglada will later tell me, he’s been wondering what might happen if Alexei Gil tried to throw the ball past Leslie Anderson.

Between the release of the pitch and the crack of the bat is only a split second, but it’s long enough for Anglada to think: I was afraid of that. The ball rockets off Anderson’s bat and down the right-field line; it exits the park so quickly that Anderson doesn’t have time to do anything but watch it leave. The only question is whether, after it clears the fence, it will clear the parking lot too. But there is no parking lot.

“Ru-je le-o-na!” the crowd chants sarcastically. (“Roar lion!”)

The male lion is the Industriales’ mascot. But a stadium full of rabid Havana-haters puts the feminine ending on the word to turn it into a girl, just for fun.

“Ru-je le-on-a! Ru-je leona! Ru-je leona!”

Anderson just throws his bat in the air and waves his arms like a dictator. It’s good to be 26 and a star, even when it doesn’t exactly pay.

As Anderson trots around the bases, the crowd keeps up its mocking chant, saved for just this opposing team, for just this moment. Even Miguelito neglects, for a moment, the cost of the lost ball. Fifteen minutes later the Camagüey closer secures the final out, the local Communist Party official throws his hands in the air and screams, and the stadium erupts. The evil empire has been defeated: 9–7.

Down inside the visitors’ dugout Rey Anglada rises and shakes hands with his players. If a Cuban journalist were around to ask him the question, Anglada would have said that he blamed himself: he’d trusted in Alexei Gil’s fastball too long. A few years ago, when his bullpen was more talented, he might have pulled Gil and brought in someone else. His tempestuous hard-throwing right-hander, Yoankis Turino, perhaps. Or his lefty Francisley Bueno. Or a pitcher with good off-speed stuff, like Osbek Castillo. Osbek didn’t have Gil’s raw talent, but he was wily and good under pressure. But when Rey Anglada looked to the pen he was reminded that Yoankis and Francisley and Osbek had all left, on a boat to Florida. “They aren’t the ones I would have picked to try to make the major leagues,” says Anglada. “They had too much in their heads. Osbek, especially. Osbek had a problem thinking about the American Dream.”

Osbek Castillo is still a month away from learning that he’s been released from the Arizona Diamondbacks and is no longer a professional baseball player. On the highway, as we reach deeper into the Florida Keys, we pass a boatyard, with small motorboats stacked high on racks. They’re the size that might fit four bass fishermen comfortably, but on the night Castillo tried to leave Cuba the first time, it held 22. Osbek points and says, “We came over in one just like that. That could have been the boat.”

Three weeks after the Cuban police released him, Castillo had another call from the man in the United States calling himself Javier. Once again a windowless van picked him up, along with 18 others, including all the same ballplayers from the first escape attempt. This time, before they left the Cuban shore, the ballplayers drank a few beers to calm their nerves. But the weather was bad and the seas rough. To keep the nose of the boat down and minimize the bouncing, the men had to move to the front, and the women and children to the back. Halfway across, the engines went out, and the boat bobbed like a cork. “The driver pulled on it for 10 minutes, and it wouldn’t start.” All five players knew Cubans who had died crossing. The bobbing made them sick. Francisley threw up on Osbek, and Osbek threw up on Yoankis, and all three wished they hadn’t downed so many beers before they left.

At length, the engines caught and they raced on to they knew not where—no one had told them where they would be getting off. But at some point the driver said they were getting close, and they must all lie flat and be silent. They did as they were told, more or less, but every now and then someone on the floor would ask urgently, “Are we here yet?”

Each time, the boat pilot replied, “Just pray to God.” In Cuba, God did not exist, officially. “Everyone in the boat believed in God,” says Osbek, but what he really means is that everyone was intensely superstitious. On the beach, for good luck, Francisley had rubbed himself, head to toe, with an egg in what to the other players was a familiar Santeria rite. Yoankis had brought a sack of candies and, as they crossed over, tossed them one by one into the ocean—until the engines died, whereupon he dumped the entire sack. That was what a fellow Cuban had told him: feed the ocean candy and the ocean will be good to you.

Osbek carried with him a small stone statue, along with his beads, for rubbing. He recalls the feeling of the boat slowing as he lay curled on its floor. They were meant to remain hidden, he knew, but he couldn’t resist. “I stuck my head up, and I saw trees.” Nearing the shore the pilot cut the engines. “You’re getting off here,” he said.

‘Here” turned out to be some way from shore; the trees appeared distressingly small. “People started to say, You can’t drop me off here. It’s too far.” The boat pilot refused to budge. To show them that the water wasn’t very deep he told the tallest ballplayer, Allen Guevara, to jump out. Guevara, terrified, refused. So Yoankis Turino stepped up and said, “I’ll go.” This was his 15th escape attempt—when the boat pilot had seen him he said, “You again!” But Yoankis had never gotten this close to freedom, and he feared being caught more than anything else.

He leapt. The water was only chest-deep. Instantly, the other 18 Cubans flew over the gunwales, the women with children on their backs. No one helped each other; it was every man for himself and for his child. Frantically, Osbek caught up with Yoankis, and they began to swim in the dark ocean. “If I could have run over the water, I would have,” he says. He shared the same two fears with everyone on the boat. The first was crocodiles—they’d been led to believe that the Florida coastal waters were lousy with them. “I was thinking, If I get eaten by a crocodile, at least it’s an American crocodile,” he recalls, laughing. “An American crocodile might only eat a little of you. A Cuban crocodile would eat all of you—even the shoes.” The other, greater fear was being caught by Americans before they hit land and being taken back to Cuba. And the land was elusive. “At first I thought we must be on sand, but it was hard to walk,” he says. “We were in mud. We couldn’t walk in it. We started to crawl.”

Here entered the bizarre legal distinction between a wet-foot Cuban and a dry-foot Cuban. They all knew the deal Clinton had cut with Castro back in 1995. A Cuban on a boat at sea was a wet-foot and, by U.S. immigration law, must be returned to Cuba. A Cuban in a shopping mall in downtown Miami was clearly a dry-foot and by law could remain in the United States and pursue citizenship. But what was a Cuban crawling out of the ocean and into wet mud? The answer wasn’t obvious. Cubans had rafted across the Florida Strait only to be taken off a broken bridge in the Florida Keys—which failed to connect to the land on either side of it—and sent back to Cuba. Cubans have been caught knee-deep in the sea, just yards from the beach, and been driven back by police with water cannons—and then returned to Cuba. A Cuban crawling through mud so wet and deep that it was impossible even for a 24-year-old, 180-pound athlete to walk on was not necessarily free. “I crawled as fast as I could,” says Osbek. “I was thinking, I’ve got to make it, because land is freedom.” His Industriales teammate Yoankis arrived at a mangrove tree and climbed it. “I studied it,” Yoankis says. “My feet were dry, because they were in the tree. But the tree was in water.” A tree wouldn’t do, they decided.

In the dark they became separated, but Osbek finally arrived on an asphalt road. He still had no idea where he was. Florida, he assumed. Wherever it was, he was beginning to see it: the sun was rising. He spotted a road sign with a tiny deer on it. He was completely alone and feeling many things. Yoankis puts it best: “A lot of things go through your head,” he says, “but the one thing that hits you, once you are on dry land, is: I’m never going back.” He was happy but also, oddly, sad.

A voice called his name—then the names of the other ballplayers. Then he saw a man with a car, and the man saw him. He walked up. “I’m Javier,” the man said.

The ballplayers were the only ones greeted in the U.S. by car and driver. All 19 people from the boat were drawn to Javier’s shouts. They crowded around and asked if they too might hitch a ride, but Javier said the car was reserved for the baseball players. All the others needed to walk down the road and turn themselves in to the first authoritative-looking person they saw. “Javier never said anything about money, but you always know in the end you have to pay,” says Osbek. The going rate, he also knew, was 5 percent of whatever contract he happened to sign, once he arrived in the major leagues. Paid under the table.

Standing on Big Pine Key, the sun rising before him, Osbek Castillo knew he was now entirely dependent on this stranger who’d come to collect him. “You don’t know how it works, so you just do what they tell you to do,” he says. Soaked with saltwater and caked in mud, he climbed into the car, along with the other ballplayers and a teenage boy who’d been on the boat.

Three hours later they stumbled into the Miami home of Andy Morales—who rushed to embrace the boy, his son. To baseball-trivia buffs Andy Morales is the third-baseman who hit a three-run shot for Cuba to help beat the Orioles in Baltimore in 1999. To Yankees fans he’s the Cuban defector signed in 2001 by George Steinbrenner for $4.5 million—only to be accused by the team of lying about his age and have the Yankees try to void the contract. (They wound up settling for an estimated $2 million.) To the U.S. attorney, Morales was the fellow with Ysbel Medina-Santos (“Javier”) when Medina-Santos was arrested for drug trafficking in Chicago in 2005 (en route to seeing their friend and fellow Cuban Jose Contreras pitch for the White Sox). And to Gus Dominguez he was, along with Yuniesky Betancourt, one of just two former clients who wouldn’t testify on his behalf.

Even now none of the ballplayers believes a sports agent had selected them for defection and arranged their transport. On the witness stand Yoankis Turino said that, as he sat in Andy Morales’s living room, he heard his hosts on the phone, trying to sell them to another agent, named Bill Rigo. “I never heard the name Gus Dominguez,” says Osbek Castillo. “I don’t think he paid to get me out. Why would he?”

The prosecutors did their best to portray Gus Dominguez as a fancy-pants sports agent with money coming out of his ears. The charge didn’t square with the rest of the case—if he was so rich, why did he need to refinance his house to pay the smuggling fee? But U.S.-government prosecutors aren’t in the fairness business. They repeatedly noted that Dominguez was a “Beverly Hills sports agent,” even though his business was actually in Encino. They said several times he lived in a “gated community.” The Dominguez home is indeed in a gated community—along with approximately a third of new homes in their county in Southern California. Twice a month Delia Dominguez must pause to allow her black metal gate to creak open before she pulls onto the freeway behind the house to make the hundred-mile drive north to her husband’s prison, the Taft Community Correctional Facility, where there is no fence.

Taft prisoners are allotted 300 minutes of phone time and 20 “points” for visitors each month. Visiting days are Friday (a cost of four points), Saturday (eight), and Sunday (six). She’d prefer to visit her husband on Fridays. But she’s been forced to take on more work to pay the lawyers, whose bill is $200,000 and counting. Having spent 22 years as a school psychologist for children with special needs, she had to take a second job. Now it’s weekends or not at all.

We arrive at a low gray building, surrounded by miles of California desert, to find snaking out the door a trail of loved ones: parents, girlfriends, mothers with children too small to fully understand where their daddy is and why. Joining this line is still something of an otherworldly experience for Delia Dominguez. From the moment the trial started, she says, “I felt that I was outside of my life, looking down on our lives. Gus loved this country and what it stood for. He loved this country. When I heard them say, ‘The United States of America versus Gus Dominguez,’ my heart just sank.”

A few minutes after we’re admitted to the cafeteria through one door, Gus Dominguez enters through another, dressed in khaki pants and a white T-shirt. In the seven months he’s been in prison he’s lost 45 pounds. If he loses his appeal he’ll miss his son’s graduation from college, and, quite possibly, his daughter’s wedding and his parents’ funerals. He may even miss the next revolution in Cuba and the mass exodus of the players he knows better than anyone outside the country. He could be sitting in the middle of a billion-dollar transaction. Instead he’ll be in here, teaching math and English grammar to fellow prisoners for 30 cents an hour. “They’re smart people in here,” he says with a smile. “We have eight lawyers, three judges, and two mayors.”

His own lawyers he hasn’t heard from in six months. During the trial he worried they were distracted. Now he has reason to believe it: his lawyer Ben Kuehne—who, oddly enough, also represented Al Gore in critical Palm Beach County during the 2000-election recount—has just himself been indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., for money laundering. (Mr. Kuehne has declared his total innocence of the charges.) Still: Why couldn’t he convince the jury that Gus Dominguez was the sort of man who tried to fix it himself when his children were threatened by people he’d never met, people who made their livings doing many bad things? Why hadn’t they explained to the jury how little commercial sense it made to smuggle those particular players? In his office Dominguez had kept a wish list of Cuban baseball players. The ones he’d been accused of smuggling weren’t even in his top 50. (Leslie Anderson, on the other hand, still makes his eyes twinkle.) Why didn’t they hammer home the point that a man trying to hide what he’s doing doesn’t wire the money but pays in cash? A man who sends a wire is a man who wants proof that he’s paid—as Gus had, in case the smugglers tried to deny it. Why hadn’t the jury learned how the baseball-player-smuggling trade actually worked—with the smugglers doing it all on their own and billing directly the players who made it to the big leagues, without anyone ever finding out? Why had it so clearly worked against him to testify on his own behalf? “I believed the jury would believe my story,” he says, “and I was wrong.”

And why, in the end, was this crime he says he didn’t commit so awful? Even more than ordinary citizens, Cuban ballplayers are prisoners of the state. “The most prized possessions to Fidel Castro were the baseball players,” says Dominguez. A democratic government should encourage, not punish, those who seek to help victims of tyranny to escape. “If this country cannot say to those people, ‘Come to us—we’ll give you freedom,’ where else can they go?”

For the last 15 years Dominguez has followed the Cuban national team wherever they’ve traveled outside Cuba. He’d sit in the same seat in the stands, behind the bullpen, and the players would holler their room numbers so he might call them to discuss their future plans. When the national team was playing in Saltillo, Mexico, in 2002, a pitcher named Maels Rodriguez knocked on his door and announced he wanted to defect. Rodriguez was then throwing 101-m.p.h. fastballs and widely regarded as one of the finest pitchers not just in Cuba but on the planet. Gus had called around and thought Maels’s first contract would come in at around $40 million. On the road to the United States, however, Maels seemed tired, so they stopped at a hotel. In the middle of the night Gus awakened to find Rodriguez gone. As his agent slept, the pitcher had called his wife back in Cuba to tell her that all had gone as planned: he was on his way to the United States. But his wife had wept, and Maels changed his mind and grabbed a taxi back to his Cuban team. A year later Maels fled Cuba again, but by then his arm had been destroyed by the neglect and overuse common in a system that didn’t put a price on it, and there was no longer a market for his services. “That was a $40 million mistake,” says Dominguez. “It’s one thing I’ve never understood about Cuban players. When they have a chance to defect, they don’t seize it. They’re torn.”

Cuban lives were defined by accident, and now so was Dominguez’s. It was an accident that he ever became a sports agent. It was an accident that he didn’t become so rich from Cuban baseball players that the charge of smuggling lesser players would seem risible. It was an accident that led him to this prison. Of the judicial system: the trial didn’t need to be in Key West; it might have been held in Miami, and in Miami, with a jury more savvy about matters Cuban, he may have won. Of characters: if the Seattle Mariners’ shortstop had been a different sort of kid he’d have come forward and told the truth about his dealings with his smugglers. Of timing: Fidel might have died, Bush might have lost, Americans might have been less hysterical about immigration. “If you want to know what I really think,” Dominguez says, “I think the attorney general wanted to get someone doing something with illegal immigrants who, when they got him, hit the newspapers.”

It’s hard for a man in a prison uniform to seem innocent, but Gus Dominguez seems innocent. Did he do what the U.S. government says he did? I doubt it. Does it matter? No. He picked the wrong time to be caught between the United States and the strangers who saw it as a place where they might create better lives. He’d been a bridge between cultures, at a time when such bridges were being blown up.